Intel, Dell at the Center of the Stampede Supercomputer in Texas

TACC

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC), founded in 2001, has been a key computational research facility over the past 10-plus years, starting off with a midlevel Cray system and now housing several powerful supercomputers.

The Texas Advanced Computing Center, or TACC, houses some of the world's most powerful supercomputers, including Ranger, which at one point was among the world's top 10 fastest supercomputers, with more than 500 teraflops of performance. Now TACC engineers are in the process of completing the construction of Stampede, which when it becomes fully operational early next year, will offer up to 10 petaflops of performance. At the foundation of Stampede will be Dell systems designed for such hyperscale environments, powered by Intel's eight-core Xeon E5-2680 chips. The Xeon chips will offer more than 2 petaflops of performance. In addition, the system will leverage Intel's upcoming Xeon Phi coprocessors, which will help the system process highly parallel workloads. The co-processors will provide more than 7 petaflops of performance, according to TACC officials. As future generations of Intel chips are incorporated into Stampede, the supercomputer's peak performance could jump to as high as 15 petaflops. Other companies that are contributing technology to Stampede include Mellanox, which is providing 56G-bps InfiniBand networking equipment. Officials with TACC and Intel recently gave tech journalists a tour of both Stampede and Ranger. (All photos by Jeffrey Burt/eWEEK)